Grace

A Leaders Guide to a Better Us

John Baldoni

• Publisher: Indigo River Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781948080880
• eBook ISBN: 9781950906017
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

John Baldoni's new book on the power of GRACE is a must read for all of us and particularly for anyone seeking to serve in a leadership role. In a world where good manners and courtesy sometimes seem to have gone out of style, this book is a practical guide for bettering relationships in all types of human connections. In a spiritual sense grace is unearned and as such, it is yours to use for the betterment of self and others. Grace as a gift is a catalyst for positive change to enable the greater good. Baldoni's GRACE mixes stories of everyday heroes with interviews of notable thought leaders. The results give practical insights into generosity, respect, and compassion coupled with the energy and actions it takes to deliver on these virtues. Baldoni turns GRACE into an acronym:

• G enerosity, the will to do something for others
• R espect, the dignity of life and work
• A ction, the mechanism for change
• C ompassion, the concern for others
• E nergy, the spirit that catalyzes people

We can apply these universal truths in ordinary as well as extraordinary situations. Baldoni adds life to GRACE by including the stories of the famous as well as not-so famous, including Aretha Franklin, Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, Franklin Roosevelt and so many more. Each of whom inspires us with their example of compassion, courage and commitment to the greater good.

Chapter 4

“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

—Susan Sontag

Action

A is action, the mechanism for change.

Change is inherent to the human condition. We are born. We mature. We die. While we cannot control the first step, how we live conditions how we live our lives and in what state we will leave our place in this world. Those with a bias for action will be those who look at life as a gift that rewards us only if we are willing to return that gift through our actions.

Answering the Call to Action

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s introduction to the Flint water crisis did not come from her patients. It came at a gathering of friends from high school, one of whom was Elin Betanzo. She had worked for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington a decade previously when the agency had dealt with a contaminated water problem. Elin told Mona that untreated water contains lead. As a pediatrician, Dr. Mona knew something else about lead; it was asymptomatic in children. Its presence is only revealed through blood tests.

Dr. Mona was shocked. “It is Michigan, literally, in the middle of the largest source of freshwater in the world. Despite that, there are laws and regulations, and there are people whose main job is to make sure our waters safe,” Dr. Mona told Cynthia Canty of Michigan Radio’ s Stateside program. The problem with Flint’s water was the result of cost-savings. The city, then under a state-mandate, had switched from using water from Lake Huron to water from the Flint River. Worse, it was coming through the untreated lead pipes and its corrosive effect leeched the lead from pipes into the drinking supply.

“I am not a patient person, I’m an action person,” Dr. Mona says.. A month’s worth of research had turned up some alarming data about the danger to the drinking water. “I wanted to get this out as soon as possible because I wanted people to take precautions, so I was relieved. I was ready for that press conference. I wanted to shout these results from a mountaintop.” Dr. Mark Watson of Virginia Tech had already discovered contamination. Still, no authorities were listening. “It never should have gotten to the point of me. So, when I think of this crisis, I think of it as a series of dominoes and I am the last domino. It should have stopped when that first mom said, ‘Hey there’s something wrong with my water.’”

Immediately state authorities, sought to discredit her research. “The state said that I was an unfortunate researcher, that I was causing near-hysteria, that I was splicing and dicing numbers,” Hanna-Attisha said on Fresh Air. “It’s very difficult when you are presenting science and facts and numbers to have the state say that you are wrong.” She readily agrees that she and her colleagues broke protocol by announcing results so early but this was a time of crisis where the cost of inaction outweighed action. “I realized that my science, my facts, my evidence, my research was about numbers. But that every single number in my research was a kid, was a child, was one of my Flint kids,” Hanna-Attisha told Michigan Radio’s “Stateside” program “And it is those kids and it was their names and it was their faces that woke me up and put me back in this ring and got me to fight back for them.”

“The consequences of lead exposure are something we don’t readily see.” Dr. Mona told Terry Gross on Fresh Air. “It impacts, at a population level, cognition, so actually drops the IQ of a population of children, shifting that IQ curve to the left where you have more children who need special education services, less gifted kids.” It leads to behavioral problems as well as cognitive ones.

While there is no cure for lead poisoning, Dr. Mona and colleagues did not stand down. “Our response in Flint has been very proactive and preventative, because we cannot ethically wait to see the consequences of lead poisoning, of lead exposure, so we have put into place multiple, multiple interventions that we know that will promote children’s brain development and limit the impact of this crisis.” Lead poison is not the only toxin kids in poor communities face. “Growing up in poverty is a toxic stress,” says Dr. Mona. “Being exposed to violence, lack of nutrition, unsafe places to play—all of these are toxic stresses. And now recently, with the incredible science of brain development, we’ve learned that all this repetitive stress and trauma for children impacts their entire life course trajectory in a very graded and predictable way.”

Born in England Dr. Mona is the child of Iraqi immigrants who settled in Michigan where there was a large population of Iraqi Christians in the greater Detroit area. Her father, however, landed a post-doctoral research position at Michigan Tech, located at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (aka the UP), some twelve hours distance by car.

It was an incident that occurred on one of those long journeys back and forth from the UP to the Detroit area to visit family that triggered Mona’s interest in medicine. The car in which she was riding in hit black ice and spun out of control. Mona said on “Stateside” that upon reaching the hospital, “My mom noticed that my face was crooked.” Later young Mona noticed the presence of someone else. “This young do...

Table of contents

• List of Contributors
• Why Grace?
• Generosity
• Respect
• Action
• Compassion
• Energy
• A Leader’s Guide to a Better Us
• Acknowledgements